shahine.com/omar/

Lenn Pryor, who has the unique roll of being Robert Scoble's manager, recently switched to dasBlog. Jeff Sandquist, one of Robert's co-workers also switched over from Radio. He posted a nice How-To on moving from Radio Userland to dasBlog (importing posts, comments etc). It's a little known feature that dasBlog can actually move all your Radio stuff over, as well as continue to upstream your posts to your Radio site (via upstreaming service) as well as map your Radio links to dasBlog links using custom http handlers. Clemens (dasBlog papa), myself and a few others actually moved from Radio to dasBlog using some of these tools.

Some pictures of the pile of snow that engulfed my car. It took about 1 hours to dig the car out (2 people). After I got the back out, the All Wheel Drive took over and my car just powered out of the hole it was in. I love AWD + All Weather Tires. Worth every penny .

Never in my life have I seen so much snow (and I've seen my fair share). I've been up in Tahoe since Saturday, and it's snowed at least 6ft in the last 36 hours. I've been learning to snowboard (skiier all my life) and I have to say, snowboarding gets the nod over skiing. It's fantastic. Anyway, the snow is still coming down very strong. The bad news is that my wife did not fair so well. She broke her arm our second day out. Luckily, it was a good break (I didn't know there was such a thing) and should heal quickly. Tomorrow is our last day, and I'm looking forward to seeing San Francisco (although I hear the rain is horrible).

Funny enough I can get WiFi here, but no ATT service. Go figure.

Rats! As I get ready to go on a vacation this next week, my Motorolla MPX-200 smartphone just up and died on me. I had to dust off my old T68i (thank god for GSM and SIM cards, I can just swap them).

This is a real bummer though. I was planning on leaving my laptop at home and just getting by with my Smartphone for e-mail access to my MS Exchange account. Seems this isn't going to happen. I've come to depend on my smartphone in more ways than I can help at this point. It's my calendar, contacts list and lightweight e-mail device. It's also got a program called eWallet that stores all my bank financial info etc. In short, this thing is an invaluable tool. Not sure how I'll get by for a week w/o it. Luckily I can use Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) from my T68, but it's slow as molasses.

For much of my career at Microsoft I’ve owned mail related features. I pretty much designed all the IMAP support in Entourage with Mike Fullerton and Steve Friesen and I’m pretty happy with how it works. IMAP itself is a complex protocol to implement properly (it’s been redone about 3 times now). Each server has its own little nuances, but generally, I love the concept because everything is stored on the server.  I can check my mail from multiple computers and use web mail w/o needing my own personal Exchange account.

However, there are some frustrating things about IMAP such as the delete model. With IMAP when you delete a message, it’s simply marked for deletion. It’s just a flag. In many clients the message remains, and the client must purge the mailbox to get rid of it (purging the mailbox removes all messages marked for deletion).

In Entourage, we offer a delete model (on by default) that behaves like a local mail client (or Exchange). Messages are copied to the deleted items folder, marked for deletion, and the mailbox is purged. However, this is a lot of work for a simple delete. There is no IMAP MOVE command, only COPY. To make matters worse, when you COPY a message on many IMAP servers, you don’t know what the message UID (Unique ID) is in that new folder. This makes it very difficult to support actions such as Undo, or any complex message tracking like we do in Entourage. A way around this is to search the destination mailbox for the message and get the UID. Luckily Exchange now returns the UID by supporting some newer IMAP extensions (UID Plus).

For me, the main features I want in an IMAP client are the following:

To understand what Internet style attributions are about, and why Format-Flowed is a nice feature take a look at this pic from a plain text message that I’ve replied to 3 times in Outlook (the same thing would happen in Entourage, OE and a few other products).

Below is a screen shot of Thunderbird and what Internet Style attributions look like, as well as Format Flowed support (where text is wrapped properly). As you grow and shrink the window, the quoted text is dynamically re-flowed as it would be in a web browser. This is much better than the 72 or so character line breaks that can get to be a mess and you end up with text like so:

IMAP Server

So, the mail features I want in an IMAP server are:

• Server side rules (all mail is directed to folders on the server).
• Server side spam filtering
• Backups.
• Web based interface

I’ve been looking for a decent Windows IMAP Client for the past few years with little success. Luckily I have a great IMAP Server provider, Fastmail. They provide all the features above, and run a decent IMAP server.  I’ve been using them for almost 2 years now.

IMAP Clients

Client wise here is a run down on what I’ve tried (yes, this is by no means scientific, unbiased etc; it’s just based on my experience as a user with these products):

Executive Summary: Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.

• Outlook : Needs improvment 
1. Does not support the exchange like delete model I reference above
2. Does not store sent mail on the IMAP server, but your Exchange server or local folder is you don’t have an exchange server
3. Message must manually be purged for each folder
4. No internet style attribution.
5. No IDLE support (at least I don’t think so) Larry Osterman informed me that Outlook does support IDLE. Thanks Larry.
6. Hard to find messages easily (and no server side IMAP search). Thankfully, MSN Search Toolbar and a number of products like X1, Lookout, etc fill this void very nicely. MSN Search being my favorite.
7. One of the best Junk Mail Filters (same technology we use at Hotmail)
• Windows Outlook Express : Needs improvement
  1. Fast as heck
  2. Purges message when you switch from folder to folder, which is better than outlook.
  3. No internet style attribution.
  4. No IDLE support (at least I don’t think so) Larry Osterman informed me that OE does support IDLE. Thanks Larry.
  5. Poor Offline support.
  6. Hard to find messages easily (and no server side IMAP search). Thankfully, MSN Search Toolbar supports this.
• Windows Eudora : Not acceptable 
  1. Slow as molasses
  2. Frequently corrupts local IMAP folders
  3. Horrible interface
  4. Funky IMAP support.
• Entourage : Excellent
  1. I helped to design most of the IMAP support, so there is nothing wrong with it (hehe). Well nothing that I’m unhappy about.
• Thunderbird : Good
  1. Fast
  2. Supports the delete model I like
  3. Junk Mail filter
  4. Internet style attribution
  5. Supports IDLE (turns out at the time that I wrote this post, Thunderbird did not support IDLE. However, this was recently added)!
  6. Easy to find messages and supports server side IMAP search!!!!
  7. Doesn’t support getting unread counts for all folders w/o manually tweaking the application preferences.
  8. Supports mailbox quota

Update: I updated this post to reflect some corrections, edits and changes.

In my effort to replace analogue systems in my life with digital ones, my Tablet PC has allowed me to completely replace the need to ever use a fax machine. I can send and receive faxes anywhere that I can get an Internet Connection. I can also annotate virtually any document and send via Fax. Here's how.

Office 2003 has a new feature called the Internet Fax Service. This allows you to send a fax of any Office document via the Internet. Here at Microsoft we have an internal Fax Service (not sure how that works) but you can also get service from a company like venali.

We also have an inbound fax service. Any fax sent to a Microsoft corporate fax number is digitally delivered via e-mail. This enables some cool scenarios like:

1. Receive forms via Fax, complete on Tablet PC (sign documents etc) and send. No trip to the fax machine.
2. Scan any document, use Microsoft Office Document Scanning (included with Office XP and 2003), edit using Microsoft Office Document Imaging, and send.

This is a huge time saver for me.

Sorry to all those folks who signed up with Gearhost on my recommendation. Having been with them for 4 months now, I've come to the conclusion that they have intolerable uptime and unacceptable customer service.

My site goes down on average once a day. When it does go down I have to open a support ticket to get some one to fix it. To date I have not received a single credit for any of this down time. As I write this my server has been up for 1 hour (and earlier today it was only up for .8 hours). This means that it’s constantly going down then kick-started till it dies again.

Once they completely horked my data (server went down for about 36 hours) and I lost all my posts (I had a backup). Their Windows 2003 migration was planned for 2 weeks ago and they just didn't do it and they didn't offer any explanation as to why. I've completely come to wits end with them. They claim that this migration is going to solve all these problems, but I don’t buy it any more and it sure won’t help their lack of customer service.

Another nit of mine is that each time I’ve complained they have done nothing but Band-Aid the problem only to have the server die again. I have passively been thinking of moving to some one else, but I’ve never found a host that is as competitive with pricing and features as Gearhost. However, Jason Alexander just switched from webhost4life to EAServe so I took a look at them and they looked perfect.

So, lets compare what I have now vs. the competition.

So, I'm basically giving up 50 MB of storage and 15 GB of bandwidth. However, my site peaked at 2.2 GB of bandwidth in October and since then has been under 2 GB. So, I'm not giving anything up there. For everything else I lose a little, but I think I gain a heck of a lot more (SSL cert for free, SQL database). Setup is free, so I created an account today after having all my pre-sales questions answered via e-mail. I had a million questions and Eric Pratt answered 6 or so of my e-mails with less than 30 min turnarounds (some times in under 5 minutes).

So I proceeded to test out hosting dasBlog over there. I copied the bits over and ran into a problem. None of the log files were getting written to the logs folder. I tried in vein to debug this myself but failed. I decided to IM them via MSN Messenger. Eric, who I ended up chatting with, dove right in and started to trouble shoot. He went so far as to ask me for the dasBlog source code so that he could reproduce the problem. I had to run out the door for an errand and when I returned the problem was fixed. When I asked him how he fixed it he told me that he was able to audit the server logs and determine that NETWORK SERVICE was attempting to write the log files while the IIS user account was writing all the other files (posts, comments etc). I’ll have to ask around to find out why there is a discrepancy here (Eric says that ASP.NET apps should always use the IIS User account to write files to disk).

Anyway, EAServe uses impersonation to give the machine the ability to write files rather than having to give ASPNET worker process explicit write permissions to dasBlog. This works fine, as I mentioned, except for the logs problem.

Anyway, as I told Eric, my experience getting up and running with EAServe couldn’t have been better. They really blow Gearhost out of the water when it comes to customer satisfaction. Eric has really gone out of his way to make my transition as trouble free as possible. Truly excellent customer service!!!

So, if you need an ASP.NET host, EAServe is your company. For $14.95 a month it’s a deal (currently no setup fees either). I’ll be migrating my web content over there in the next couple of days.

Jeff Key recently posted on WMA/AAC/iTunes etc etc. I personally don't care about any of this and here is why:

1. I have an iPod
2. I have a Windows Media Center PC
3. I have a few Windows XP machines
4. I have a few Macs

I want to be able to listen to my music everywhere. I also want to rip my music ONCE in my life (unless massive hard drive failure occurs in which case I have to do this all again). I don't buy DRM'ed music because I cannot purchase WMA and listen to it on my iPod and I can't buy iTunes music and listen to it on my Media Center PC (which is the hub of my living room and bedroom entertainment centers).

So, here is how you get the best of everything:

1. Get a big hard drive. I have two 200 GB drives in a RAID mirror for redundancy. I have a third 200 GB drive that acts as a backup to the RAID.
1. The reason I do this is that I've lost my entire music collection once due to hard drive failure.
2. Using a PC, rip all your audio using WMA Lossless. This results in about a 50% lossless compression. So each CD takes up on average 250 - 300 MB of data. Lossless compression ensures that your audio is encoded digitally bit for bit.
3. Transcode all the audio to MP3 using the Windows Media Plus Pack Audio Converter for $19.95 and an MP3 encoder (you need an MP3 encoder to convert from WMA to MP3). It took my PC 2 days to convert about 150 CDs to MP3 (running 24/7) w/o any user intervention.
4. Use Napster 2.0 to stream/download any music I want and listen to on any PC device (Macs not included). Anything I like I and want to listen to on my iPod I purchase the CD of using Amazon.com One Click. Napster holds me over till I get the real bits, and encode losslessly and then transcode so I can enjoy on my iPod.

The nice thing about encoding using lossless is that I can transcode to any audio format that has a direct show encoding plugin (hooks into Windows Media Player). This means that I'm not tied to any single audio format, so the end result is I don't care if it's MP3 or AAC or whatever lossy codec is popular.

The only downside to my system is that I cannot purchase music online and enjoy on all my digital devices. However, if I'm going to pay .99 cents for a song I sure as heck don't want lossy music. I just get the CD from Amazon and wait a few days to listen to the music on my iPod. I can live with that for now till there is a good enough WMA based device to replace my iPod (and right now there isn't a good enough device that matches or beats the iPod).

I've always wanted an easy (built into my blog editor) way to take a code snippet like this:

// Hello World
static void Main()
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
}

and make it look pretty like this:

// Hello World
static void Main()
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
}

Well, thanks to Thomas Johansen and Christian Nordbakk for writting AylarSolutions Highlight. I've gotten it working in FreeTextBox for dasBlog. It would be cool if Scott added this to .Text as well.

I basically added this to FreeTextBox  by creating a button, adding it to a toolbar, and then having that button invoke an aspx page that looks like this:

Makes posting code snippets easy!